About

Rebecca L. Walker is a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, holding positions in both the Department of Philosophy and the Department of Social Medicine. She is a philosopher of medicine whose primary focus is on the relationship between moral theories and concepts and various biomedical practices. Her research has concentrated on biomedical research areas including animal research, phase I healthy volunteer research, and genomic advances. Additionally, she addresses topics in health care such as professional ethics, distributive justice, and concepts of autonomy, employing both philosophical and social science methods. She has contributed to the launch of the Animal Studies Project at UNC, which fosters community and collaboration among researchers in animal studies and animal ethics. Currently, she is a Fellow in the Academic Leadership Program at the Institute for the Arts and Humanities. Walker has published a monograph titled "Of Mice and Primates: Virtue Ethics and Animal Research" and co-edited several collected volumes on virtue ethics, health inequalities, and social medicine. Her original research has appeared in numerous respected journals across bioethics, medicine, and philosophy. She completed a Greenwall post-doctoral fellowship in bioethics and health policy at Johns Hopkins University in 2001, followed by a visiting faculty position at the University of Michigan, where she directed the Life Sciences, Values and Society Program. Since 2003, she has been at UNC, teaching medical students, undergraduates, and graduate students, and has served in various roles including co-director of education on the UNC hospital ethics service and bioethicist on the institutional animal care and use committee. She has been a principal investigator on NIH-supported studies related to research ethics and genome editing technologies. Within the university, she is a fellow in the Parr Center for Ethics, an adjunct professor in the public policy department, and has served on multiple advisory and faculty committees. At the state level, she contributed to COVID-19 advisory committees on resource allocation and vaccine policy. In 2021, she was elected a Hastings Center fellow, joining a community of scholars dedicated to advancing public understanding of complex ethical issues in health, health care, science, and technology.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Medicine
• Public relations
• Biology
• Internal medicine
• Family medicine
• Business
• Microbiology
• Psychology
• Immunology
• Engineering
• Social psychology
• Engineering ethics
• Genetics
• Physical therapy

Selected publications

• Picking and Choosing Among Phase I Trials

  UNC Libraries · 2025-07-12

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Is Enhancement the Price of Prevention in Human Gene Editing?

  UNC Libraries · 2025-02-26

  articleOpen access

  New gene-editing tools challenge conventional policy proscriptions of research aimed at either human germline gene editing or human enhancement by potentially lowering technical barriers to both kinds of intervention. Some recent gene-editing reports have begun to take up the prospect of germline editing, but most experts are in broad agreement that research should prioritize medical applications over attempts to enhance human traits. However, there is little consensus about what counts as human enhancement in this context, or how to deal with the issues it flags. Moreover, several influential reports interpret medical applications to include disease prevention as well as treatment as a goal for gene-editing research. This challenges the current policy consensus because using gene editing to prevent disease would incidentally facilitate human enhancement applications in a variety of ways. If such research efforts are penalized by policy concerns about enhancement, then their preventive health benefits could be lost. To avoid being caught off guard by such challenges, science policy makers will need to think more carefully about what "prevention" might mean in the gene-editing context, and develop research governance that can anticipate and address the human enhancement concerns it will raise. To accomplish the latter, the scope of policy making will need to expand from its narrow focus on human clinical trials to engage with basic researchers driving the translational pipeline toward preventive gene editing and the science policy makers who have to address its "off-label" uses.

  PublisherDOI

• Intellectual Virtues for Animal Science

  2025-04-24

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This chapter turns to the intellectual virtues and considers how these are relevant for animal research science. It begins with a discussion of some background questions regarding moral and intellectual virtue and how these are differentiated. It then outlines three pairs of intellectual virtues and vices that are relevant for laboratory animal science. These are intellectual honesty and dishonesty, intellectual courage and cowardice, and intellectual humility and arrogance. These virtues and vices are then discussed in the context of ethically salient issues in animal research science including the translational value of this work to human health questions, the animal research principles of replacement, reduction, and refinement, and the value of transparency in science. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the extent to which intellectual virtues that may be valuable for science may nevertheless come into tension with animal welfare goals.

  PublisherDOI

• A New Governance Approach to Regulating Human Genome Editing.

  North Carolina journal of law & technology · 2025 · 6 citations

  • Political Science
  • Political Science
  • Public relations

  For years, genomic medicine-medicine based on the growing understanding of the genetic contribution to many diseases and conditions-has been hailed as the future of medical treatment, but it has thus far had limited effect on day-to-day medical practice. The ultimate goal of genomic medicine has always been the ability not just to identify dangerous gene mutations, but to fix them. Now CRISPR and related genome-editing technologies may have the potential to provide a safe and effective way to repair dangerous mutations. In the wake of ethically dubious experiments with human embryos in China, the international governance of human genome editing is emerging as an urgent topic for scientists, regulators, and the public. Efforts to develop a governance model are underway at national and international levels. These efforts are the subject of multiple initiatives by national and international health and science organizations and are topics of discussion at scientific conferences, summits, and meetings. This Article reports on the Authors' multi-year, interdisciplinary project to identify and investigate the practical, ethical, and policy considerations that are emerging as the greatest concerns about human genome editing, and ultimately to develop policy options. The project involves monitoring the discussions of groups, both government-sponsored and private, that are considering how genome editing should be governed; observing conferences where the topic is discussed; analyzing emerging policy reports by national and international bodies; and interviewing a wide range of stakeholders, including scientists, ethicists, and those who make and comment on public policy. The Article identifies several stakeholder concerns that are especially prominent in the research to date and begins to explore the implications of these concerns for alternative models of governance. There are current indications that, for practical purposes, a focus on "soft," hybrid forms of governance based on networks of multiple public and private stakeholders may turn out to be the most promising course to pursue. The "new governance" paradigm developed in the corporate and financial sectors offers a useful model for understanding the dynamics of this approach.

  PublisherOA PDF

• Rights and Welfare: A Case Study

  2025-04-24

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This chapter introduces the classic animal rights and utilitarian views of Tom Regan and Peter Singer, respectively, and applies these perspectives to the case of Harry Harlow’s primate research. The purpose of this chapter is to show how the virtue perspective differs from these classic ethical theory approaches to animal research. It does this by examining how each perspective would frame and address what is at moral issue with Harlow’s research uses of vulnerable macaque monkeys and by contrasting these approaches with a virtue ethical perspective. It emphasizes how the virtue ethical view is focused on moral questions beyond those of whether Harlow’s research uses of macaques were justified.

  PublisherDOI

• Challenging the Boundaries Between Treatment, Prevention, and Enhancement in Human Genome Editing

  UNC Libraries · 2025-03-04

  articleOpen access

  Traditional distinctions between treatment and enhancement goals for human genome editing (HGE) have animated oversight considerations, yet these categories have been complicated by the addition of prevention as a possible target for HGE applications. To assess the role these three categories might play in continued HGE governance efforts, we report on interviews with genome editing scientists and governance group members. While some accepted traditional distinctions between treatment and enhancement and rejected the latter as unacceptable, others argued that the concept of enhancement is largely irrelevant or not as morally problematic as suggested. Others described how preventive goals for HGE create gray zones where prevention and enhancement may be difficult to distinguish, which may stymie uses of HGE. We conclude by discussing the governance implications of these various understandings of treatment, prevention, and enhancement as HGE research moves beyond the treatment of serious disease to embrace longer range preventive goals.

  PublisherDOI

• The Ethics of General Population Preventive Genomic Sequencing: Rights and Social Justice

  UNC Libraries · 2025-09-09

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Advances in DNA sequencing technology open new possibilities for public health genomics, especially in the form of general population preventive genomic sequencing (PGS). Such screening programs would sit at the intersection of public health and preventive health care, and thereby at once invite and resist the use of clinical ethics and public health ethics frameworks. Despite their differences, these ethics frameworks traditionally share a central concern for individual rights. We examine two putative individual rights-the right not to know, and the child's right to an open future-frequently invoked in discussions of predictive genetic testing, in order to explore their potential contribution to evaluating this new practice. Ultimately, we conclude that traditional clinical and public health ethics frameworks, and these two rights in particular, should be complemented by a social justice perspective in order adequately to characterize the ethical dimensions of general population PGS programs.

  PublisherDOI

• Biomedical Researchers' Perceptions of the NIH's Sex as a Biological Variable Policy for Animal Research: Results from a U.S. National Survey

  UNC Libraries · 2025-06-12

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  <strong><em>Background:</em></strong> In 2015, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) established a policy on sex as a biological variable (SABV) in an effort to address the overrepresentation of men and male animals in biomedical research and the lack of attention to sex-based responses to medical treatments. However, questions remain regarding how U.S. biomedical researchers perceive the impact of the SABV policy on their own research and on translational science more broadly. <strong><em>Materials and Methods:</em></strong> A national survey of U.S. scientists who use vertebrate animals in their research was conducted. Respondents were asked how they select and use animal species as model organisms as well as how they perceive the impact of the SABV policy on their research practices. <strong><em>Results:</em></strong> Almost all respondents reported that they had previously heard of the NIH SABV policy, and over one-third had altered their study designs to comply with the policy. There were robust differences in perceptions of the SABV policy based on researchers' primary species of model organism. However, there was no significant difference in the likelihood of researchers analyzing their results by sex based on whether they had received recent NIH funding. <strong><em>Conclusions:</em></strong> While many researchers report adhering to the SABV policy requirements, more work needs to be done to ensure that the policy is being evenly applied to researchers using all types of animal models and that researchers adhere to the policy after receiving NIH funding, particularly in terms of reporting on and analyzing SABV in their study findings for publication.

  PublisherDOI

• Friendship, Human-Animal Bonds, and Partiality in the Lab

  2025-04-24

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This chapter discusses the virtue of friendship, how it relates to human-animal bonds, and what implications these discussions have for treatment of animals in laboratory spaces. The chapter argues that, while human and nonhuman animals cannot be friends according to an Aristotelian perspective, the bonds that form between them share some of the ethically salient features of friendship. This chapter further suggests the partiality that is developed through human-animal bonds brings with it ethical obligations that are better appreciated through a virtue ethical theory than with some other approaches to moral theory. Finally, it explores some of the ways in which laboratory spaces and biomedical research animal uses place pressure on human-animal bonds through both animal harm and the potential for unequal benefit in constrained circumstances.

  PublisherDOI

• Notes

  2025-04-24

  other1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• Healthy Volunteers as Model Organisms: Comparative Research Ethics and Policy for Phase I trials

  NIH · $3.6M · 2012–2023

Frequent coauthors

• Jill A. Fisher

  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

  16 shared

• Margaret Waltz

  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

  10 shared

• Ian Brown

  9 shared

• Ewen Wang

  Stanford University

  9 shared

• Vania Singleterry

  Emory University

  9 shared

• McKenzie Eakin

  University of California, San Francisco

  9 shared

• Olga Saynina

  9 shared

• Eric T. Juengst

  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

  6 shared

Education

• Ph.D.

  Philosophy

• M.A.

  Philosophy

• Other

  American Studies

Awards & honors

• Greenwall Foundation post-doctoral fellowship in bioethics a…